Pool (No Water)
Metropole Hotel, Cork
★★★★★
Pool (No Water) opens on a night of such torrential rain that the audience are practically drenched from queuing to get in. This is all part of the experience, of course – but thankfully the basement arena that is the Metropole Hotel’s usually dormant swimming pool is warm and dry, the glittering tiles retaining just a gleam of damp.
Mark Ravenhill ’s loudly accusatory play, presented by Everyman as a highlight of Cork Midsummer Festival , is formed as a study of group consensus. As acolytes rather than evangelists, four friends are bound by their association with a famous artist in mutual adoration of a woman whose success suggests, these days, something of an influencer.
Their fellowship endorses this uncritical bond until events turn their gaze inward on themselves. Their heroine plunges into a pool she knows is empty and for months lies close to death.
Their loyal hospital visits become ritual. Someone brings a camera. In a process of giddy shame they produce a documentary, amazed by the many colours a bruise can make.
A series of dancelike, trancelike movements (choreographed by Luke Murphy ) exposes their internal longing for truth, but this question is raised in the empty pool, and at the shallow end.
Everything is shared, everything is loud: when they strip off for skinny-dipping they are wired for sound with mics like swollen tattoos.
So no water, but still immersive. The action is exceptionally mobile, with Evanna Lynch , Jacob McCarthy, Liv O’Donoghue and Rowan Finken running, leaping, lounging and even teetering while first declaring and then interrogating their illusory loyalties.
For the cast it must be exhausting. The audience, contained largely in the empty pool, must occasionally move to make room for the sometimes frantic activity, spurred on by Peter Power ’s sound design and Zia Bergin-Holly’s lighting. Des Kennedy, the production’s director, asks a lot from his cast, and they don’t let him down.
[ Evanna Lynch: ‘With another set of parents, in another time, I would have been dismissed as mad’ Opens in new window ]
But there’s only one real star in this production, and that’s the pool.
The Metropole is a standout assertion of the Cork architect Arthur Hill, built for the Musgrave company in 1897 and, oddly enough, a “dry” premises until 1956. Although several refurbishments have kept pace with the hotel’s clientele since then, the wonderful tiled arena of the pool looks to have changed little.
Here the influencer might have been some Roman circus, the walkways distinguished by burnished figures holding aloft flamelike lamps. Walls and floors are tiled with a marvellous suggestion of marble.
There is a hint of the singing swimmer Esther Williams, of Dustin Hoffman ’s Graduate, of Burt Lancaster ’s neighbourhood odyssey. There is even a whiff of the recently deceased David Hockney ’s Bigger Splash.
The choice of such a powerful symbol of social eminence for this presentation may have been inspired by a recognition of its heritage in history as in art, and certainly it elevates Ravenhill’s argument to age-old glamour.
Pool (No Water), staged by the Everyman , is at the Metropole Hotel, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival , until Saturday, June 27th
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